2009 / January 9^th/ 2008. It’s a wrap.

2008 was a landmark year. In 2007 I graduated college with my B.S. in Civil Engineering, and 2008 was the year I looked past the degree and started my life.

In January I was working at Web Associates feverishly working on a monstrous WPF/XAML project for Hewlitt-Packard. To this date, it’s probably the coolest project I’ve ever worked on and I don’t even have a video of how it worked. Fail.

In February I became absolutely infatuated with the presidential race. Beyond the historic nature of the primary elections, it was the first election in which I realized voting matters. 2004 was the first presidental race in which I could legally vote and I had simply assumed Bush would lose. I took things more seriously in 2008.

In March I gave notice to Web Associates and informed them I’d be leaving at the end of the month. I was still working on the HP project. I then attended SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, Texas — marking the furthest East I’ve ever made it in the US (Costa Rica being the furthest East in the world). It was awesome, it was tiring. It was not very informative. It was not life changing. Perhaps I built a habit of surrounding myself with people full of personal drive that going to SXSW didn’t really expose me to much. It’s like a geek Mardis Gras (with 50% of the nudity).

In April I started working with the rockstars at ENTP and worked on all kinds of awesome stuff. Obama won the primary, but Hillary kept on.

In May I finally made it up to Portland, Oregon to finally meet some people that I had known for years and were now paying my bills.

In June I saw this totally awesome video on Vimeo that is still indescribably awesome.

In July I moved from my college town of San Luis Obispo, CA up to San Francisco, CA. It’s not that I don’t love SLO, but I just wanted a change of pace. I didn’t have to be anywhere for work, so I took advantage and uprooted myself for better or worse. Turned 23.

In August I had the privilege of touring EA/Maxis’s studios for the upcoming release of Spore complete with an advance playing of the game You can read up about it over at Total Spore. The same day I trekked back home to watch Radiohead play the first ever night concert in my own backyard, Golden Gate Park.

In September the world economy collapsed and I sent many letters to my congress represenative, Nancy Pelosi. Who promptly waited until after the bailout vote to respond to my plea to rationalize her vote. What little faith I had in our congress diminished completely. I also wrote a little javascript widget to help make your selects a little sexier.

In October I’m sure something cool happened, all I know is that the month has deleted itself from my memory.

In November I drove the effort to redesign entp.com. I drove to Reno, Nevada for a weekend and campaigned door-to-door to get people out to vote. Two weeks later I took part in history, celebrated far too much and miraculously made it home via some sort of public transit system. A little later, I helped push Tender out from it’s hiding place and into the hands of testers.

In December I rested.

What did you do in 2008?

1. 

   rendez

   January 9^th | #

   Seems like you’ve achieved a lot of goals this year, that’s good. I also had a crazy year full of drastic changes and personal experiences, girls included…
   I’d like to read more often from this blog, I hope you have a even better year,

   greets.

2. 

   chris rhee

   January 9^th | #

   I also left Web Associates & rested.

3. 

   william

   January 14^th | #

   I also left Web Associates, although resting never really happened. :-)

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